Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Funniness

Epistemic Status: exploratory, plausible, uncertain
Tagged in: amateur sociology, memes,

i.

The typical explanation for the funniness of jokes is surprise; a joke is funny because it is unexpected, because it challenges expectations. This jives well with experience; you typically don't laugh as hard when you've heard the same chestnut twenty time: it becomes predictable.

As parsimonious as this explanation is, and it's pretty good (see Hurley et al. for a deeper treatment), I want to explore a kind of extension, that models some aspects of the phenomena well.

There is a certain class of statements, such as "We have them surrounded in their tanks!", that are seemingly intrinsically funny; you can hear it again and again and you at least crack a smile each time. This contradicts the surprise model, since not only is it not meaningfully violating object-level expectations, it doesn't seem to get less funny with time, indeed if the author plays his hand right he can even make it more funny because you've heard it before.

Contrast this with what I'll call extrinsically funny statements. This are the jokes with old, time-tested formula for execution: knock-knock jokes, 'whadaya call x' jokes, 'these dudes walk into a bar' jokes, etc. They are plainly funny because they violate object-level expectations at the surface level. This can be done in two ways. First when a word means something different than what you thought it meant but everything makes sense when you substitute the new meaning (puns) and ones where the words mean their usual things, but the solution is unexpected and fits (though this heavily overlaps with wonder in Sarah Perry's theory of puzzles)

You are a Pattern-Matching Agent

Or, "My (crude) model of human thought"

Epistemic Status: Plausible, but uncertain.

I.

I sorta want to learn how to draw. Until recently, my feelings about drawing were (statistically speaking) probably similar to yours: it'd be cool to do, but it the type of thing other people are good at, not me. Naturally, my thoughts weren't so blunt, e.g. "I don't know how to draw because it wouldn't be useful to me". Right.

Then, I read Dennet's Consciousness Explained. I haven't finished it, of course, but that might be fixed in a few months (I'm a busy dude). It's not a drawing book, in case you're wondering, but something I read in it made me think that perusing basic competence in sketching stuffs would be something I'd like doing.

In the section I recently finished reading, Dennet argues against the idea of 'pictures in the mind' in a particularly persuasive way (to me, anyway): if we really did have 'pictures' in our heads, then everyone would know how to draw; it'd be as simple as transferring the internal pictures to an external medium, the only barrier to everyone being professional-quality (photorealistic) artists would be hand-eye coordination (which tends to be fairly good in humans).

But that isn't the case, which was to be demonstrated, thus completing the reductio ad absurdum.

The persuasive-ness likely doesn't carry-over in my blunt-force summary, but you just need the gist of it. This argument resonated with me when I first read it, partially because I had a superficially similar pet theory of my own. I'll try to explain it, though I'll stress the mental environment and train of thought which gave birth to this idea have long since dissolved, so I can't faithfully re-construct my exact thoughts anymore than you can.

Personally, I have no idea how other people mentally see their act of mentally seeing, but for me, it's always been a very los-res affair. Seeing a dog and visualizing a dog are utterly distinct things to me. One was 'high definition', with minuscule details and structural stability. The other was, in word, not. Which isn't to say that I lacked imagination, just lacked a vivid imagination, if such a thing exists (I doubt it does).

Now, my original hypothesis about "how visualizing works" is that we don't actually visualize.

Really.